I have only recently acquired this book, and can wholeheartedly recommend it. It is substantial, being hardbound and 288 pages long. The quality of the examples is excellent and besides the many hands explored and described by the author, there are profiles and high-quality work illustrated by other calligraphers. It will take me many hours to fully digest this large book, but having had a good look at the contents, I know that I'm going to enjoy the experience. It was written by an Australian calligrapher, printed in China and published in the UK - truly international!

Although this is a UK advert, I'm sure that it will be available elsewhere.

I have only recently acquired this book, and can wholeheartedly recommend it. It is substantial, being hardbound and 288 pages long. The quality of the examples is excellent and besides the many hands explored and described by the author, there are profiles and high-quality work illustrated by other calligraphers. It will take me many hours to fully digest this large book, but having had a good look at the contents, I know that I'm going to enjoy the experience. It was written by an Australian calligrapher, printed in China and published in the UK - truly international!

Although this is a UK advert, I'm sure that it will be available elsewhere.

Hi Ken, it's reassuring to know that you like this book, as I am using it to start to learn broad pen calligraphy.

Anasanzi, I've got the "Mastering Calligraphy" version and, going by the preview pages of the other title, they appear to be the same books. Exactly the same "Contents", "Introduction" and "The Basics 1" pages, including artwork. Confusing, that!

Don't you have them in Texas? Well anyway, a British garden centre is a place at one remove from reality, where people go to idle away time. A bit like a supermarket, but the pace is much slower. Nominally it's a plant nursery and a retail outlet for sacks of gravel, fencing panels, pesticides, concrete nymphs, bird seed, gardening tools and that sort of thing, but most customers tend to wander around in a daze following a spiral path which inevitably leads to the café. If either of my local ones are anything to go by, anyway! For some reason there's always a bargain book section, and whilst most of the titles are along the lines of "100 Ways to Tie a Tie", "Ration Book Recipes" or "How To Psychoanalyse Your Cat" (when they're not colouring books or simple puzzles for the hard of thinking), it's always worth a look just on the off chance.

Don't you have them in Texas? Well anyway, a British garden centre is a place at one remove from reality, where people go to idle away time. A bit like a supermarket, but the pace is much slower. Nominally it's a plant nursery and a retail outlet for sacks of gravel, fencing panels, pesticides, concrete nymphs, bird seed, gardening tools and that sort of thing, but most customers tend to wander around in a daze following a spiral path which inevitably leads to the café. If either of my local ones are anything to go by, anyway! For some reason there's always a bargain book section, and whilst most of the titles are along the lines of "100 Ways to Tie a Tie", "Ration Book Recipes" or "How To Psychoanalyse Your Cat" (when they're not colouring books or simple puzzles for the hard of thinking), it's always worth a look just on the off chance.

@AndyT. Yes, we do have shops like that in Texas! But, there is a zero chance that you'd find a calligraphy book in one!! There are garden-related books, like "How to Grow Bigger Tomatoes" or "How to Build a Birdhouse", etc.! However, I'm going to remember to peruse the books section of my local garden center, just to verify that I'm right about their genres!

@JanisTX Interesting! I'm ashamed to admit it, but everything I "know" about Texas comes from books by Cormac McCarthy - thousands of square miles of sagebrush and mesquite with the occasional rattlesnake. So I had a vague idea that a Texas garden might be the sort of place where you could run a few hundred head of longhorns. Consider me duly enlightened.